Published 5:28 am, Thursday, September 5, 2013

A Houston-area high school student is dead following an early morning stabbing on Wednesday inside his school.

The teen, identified as 17-year-old Joshua Broussard by Houston TV station KRIV, was stabbed in a hallway of Spring High School about 7:10 a.m. Wednesday. Three other students were also injured in the incident, which police are still investigating.

The Herald’s sister Hearst newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, reports that two of the students’ injuries were minor and that the third was flown by air ambulance to a Houston hospital with injuries to his abdomen.

Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia told the Chronicle there was information the stabbing may have been gang related, saying there was a confrontation that escalated into a fight with weapons.

Three students were being interviewed as persons of interest in the case by investigators Wednesday.

For Plainview ISD Superintendent Dr. Rocky Kirk, news of the stabbing death was personal. Kirk is a former teacher, coach and assistant principal at Spring High School, as well as assistant superintendent of Spring ISD. His brother is a principal of a neighboring high school and his mother works for an adjacent school district. She is the one who notified him of the news Wednesday morning. “It kind of affected the whole area,” Kirk said of the response to the stabbing. “Everyone was immediately on heightened alert.”

He spent Wednesday communicating with friends, including one former Spring ISD board president, trying to make sense of the violence. “Unfortunately, the best crisis plans we can come up with are all short when it comes to those time when someone is intent on hurting another person,” Kirk told the Herald on Wednesday.

Early news reports have focused on Spring High School not having metal detectors, something Kirk said almost becomes ineffectual in a school that large. “The school has about 3,000 students and is about 600,000 square-feet, that’s the size of a shopping mall. The logistical implications of something that large makes it close to an impossibility to monitor.”

He added that having that level of security “crosses a line where you don’t have school, you have a prison, and that runs contrary to what environment educators want to create. I know there is going to be criticism, but I think the question ‘What we should have, could have done?’ is a little early. The direction of the conversation has to be one of the broader society in general and how are kids being raised.”

Kirk summed up his thoughts on the day focusing on his faith and the role that plays. “We live in a fallen world. Schools are meant to be by their inherent nature a place of love. Forces of evil want to pervert that to violence and hatred, and that’s what happened today.

He said his friend, the former Spring school board president, offered the prayer that some good could come out of something so horrible and horrific as what happened Wednesday morning.

Kirk confirmed Spring High School did and continues to have a gang problem. “I’m sad in that I know what they are going through,” Kirk said. “In the end, evil is evil.”